


By Any Other Name

by gogollescent



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett, Homestuck
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-07
Updated: 2012-08-07
Packaged: 2017-11-11 16:28:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/480527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for HSO br5. "Rose<3Kanaya, Ankh-Morpork."</p>
            </blockquote>





	By Any Other Name

"Join a guild, she said," you mutter. "Ply your craft, she said."  
  
Actually, Rose first suggested that you join the Watch, hiding a smile behind her hand all the while. When you refused on the grounds that law enforcement was both a) undignified and b) very likely to result in your unwilling conscription to a buddycop montage with Terezi Pyrope, she'd had to lie down with her face in a pillow for a while. Only when she recovered did she direct you to investigate the so-called Guilds of Ankh-Morpork.   
  
There were several that caught your interest; you dithered over the Guild of Topiarists and Horticultural Ambassadors, but dismissed it on the grounds that you did not, in all honesty, want to see what kind of rhododendrons could grow in the city's semisolid atmosphere. You spent furtive hours poring over the registration requirements for the Guild of Novelists (there were some two hundred pages, one hundred and ninety nine of which seemed to be someone's unedited draft. You went through for typos, feeling magnanimous, and nailed it back onto the door afterwards). But in the end, there was only one place that truly called to you.  
  
The Seamstresses' Guild[1].   
  
Which is why, after a confused interlude that you would prefer not to devote introspective attention to, you are now deep in the throes of vicious mimicry.  
  
So deeply, in fact, that you barely notice when their object stops in front of you. You sat down on the steps of the Guild hall after they evicted you from the premises, and haven't bothered to move since; her shadow falls across you like a narrow bolt of dark cloth, the kind whose design you dreamed of swindling the Guild head out of hours earlier. "Become a useful member of the community," you say, in your best high-pitched tones of humanity, and trail off only when she clears her throat.   
  
There's a pause. Her eyes track from the words over the door to your face.  
  
"Oh,  _Kanaya_ ," says Rose, her voice rich with exhaustion and inappropriate humor. "I never thought I'd find you in this part of town!" Feeling this to be insufficient, she adds,   
  
"Hem, hem."  
  
You have had quite enough.  
  
"If you had had the common decency to warn me what sort of situation I would be plowing into--"  
  
Unbelievably, she cuts you off.   
  
"How could I?" she says. "You didn't tell me your plans."  
  
You fume.  
  
"You should have guessed," you inform her, coldly, after a silence.  
  
"Of course," says Rose. "But don't you think it would be easier if next time we went planethopping to dimensions I was happily familiar with, you consulted me about the world's little quirks?"  
  
"I think it would be easier if you shut your sputtering windhole," you snap, and when she starts to laugh you drag her down into your lap. Laughing, she lets you kiss her, lets you roll her over onto the steps and mouth the awkward curve of her throat. The street is empty; but you're in public, of course, and this is unthinkable. Which mainly, means neither of you ends up shedding your socks.   
  
"Maybe now they'll take you," Rose says, lazily, stretched out on the sunny stairs in the aftermath. You smack her on the arm. She breaks out into high giggles, her hair wafting up over her mouth, and you think you've never seen her so happy as inside a story with jokes, and footnotes, and a happy ending.   
  
(They don't offer you a job. A giggling emissary of Rosie Palm herself does, however, come out and offer you an explanatory pamphlet. As if you weren't perfectly capable of satisfying Rose without the help of a manual.  
  
The sad truth is, some people wouldn't know an erotic tentacle move if it hit them across the face.)  
  
[1] A place which also, unbeknownst to you, called to you when you went out for dinner that evening and passed a lady with a very large handbag, who spent some time recommending the local selection of jelly doughnuts.


End file.
